Chapter 146. Emergency
Rhys hovered in his core, contemplating the void. He thought he had a good enough comprehension of it to manipulate it, but that clearly wasn’t the case, when it refused to so much as come when he called. He didn’t understand it at all, or maybe, his understanding was so mistaken that he couldn’t correctly call it.
The void was a space that held garbage, and it had been thrown away by the Empire, at least, so it should qualify as garbage or garbage-related, in Rhys’s opinion. Still, the fact that something was trash-related didn’t equate to him instantly having genius-level comprehension in it, and while he didn’t think he’d have to work twice as hard for half the result, he at least had to expend ordinary effort to understand it, or perhaps even something beyond ordinary effort, since the void seemed only tangentially related to trash, but still; it was close enough to qualify as trash, so he wasn’t throwing his effort into an infinite hole, like he did when he tried to learn fireballs. This was a route worth pursuing, and he was confident that he could succeed, but it wouldn’t be easy, or quick.
Still, the end result was a can that could instantly warp trash to Rhys at any point, even during battle or when he desperately needed trash, so it was worth his effort. He focused on the void while recalling the words of the book at the same time. He still hadn’t fully comprehended the book, or to be honest, made much progress on the book, but it seemed worthwhile to attempt understanding it while considering the void at the same time.
Time passed. Rhys sat before his basket, immersed in his contemplation. The words from the book whirled before his eyes; he’d memorized them long ago, with how many times he’d read it. At the same time, the void stood before him. It wasn’t much to look at, just an empty, hollow hole in space. It didn’t whirl or swirl. If he didn’t stare at it, it slipped out of his sight, vanishing into a wrinkle in space once more. If he stared at it too much, it closed in on him, threatening to overwhelm him. He had to look at it without looking at it, which was an exercise in of itself without also thinking about the book, but he insisted on keeping the book in his mind at the same time. There was something to that. Something kept shivering at the back of his mind when he recalled the book’s words and gazed into the void. The two slowly overlapped, like when he crossed his eyes and started to see two images at once, but in reverse, the two comprehensions slowly merging back into one. What he’d thought was nonsense wasn’t nonsense, not before the void. There was a truth to it, a strange echoing truth that only existed in his mind in those brief moments where he held both the book and the void in his perception at the same time. The nonsense began to make sense. The void began to unravel into truth.
A kind of understanding came to him, vague and fuzzy though it was. The void was everywhere, and nowhere. It was everything and nothing. Connected and disconnected. It existed without and within, was a part of the world and completely apart from it. Defining it was impossible, because it was a thing that defied definition, yet it could be defined by its defiance. It was emptiness. It was a lack, not a thing. Trying to hold it wasn’t like trying to hold sand, it was like trying to hold the absence of sand; like trying to cup your hand and insert it into a bucket of sand, letting the sand completely cover your palm, then pull your hand out without taking a single grain of sand with it. Like trying to put your hand in water without getting wet.
Yeah, that’s definitely the cleaner analogy of those two, Rhys thought, chuckling at himself. Either way, the problem remained the same: how did he take ‘nothing’ and attach it to ‘something?’ There wasn’t anything to attach to anything else. Or rather, the basket was sitting there just fine; it was the void that was the problem. Knitting something to nothing was a tall order, and the more he considered it, the harder it seemed to become. If he wanted to knit water to the basket, that would’ve been difficult enough, but to knit the idea of a dry hand underwater to a basket? The absence of not just water—water would’ve been easy enough, he could’ve just waterproofed it—but everything, to knit that sensation into an object… he was starting to wonder if such a thing was even possible. It’s magic. Magic can do anything, he told himself, but this particular kind of magic needed him to understand how to do the anything first, and since he didn’t understand, he couldn’t do it.
Maybe that’s what lessons and tomes do for other people, Rhys realized at last. There were no lessons and no tomes for trash-magic. No one had bothered to put them together, for some reason, and his talent was so trash at non-trash magic that he couldn’t utilize base tomes or lessons the way other people could, but if he wasn’t trash-talent at non-trash magic, then probably, tomes and lessons would explain the understanding part of magic to him, and he wouldn’t have to comprehend it all on his own.
Retreating from his mental space, he drew out the red tome and looked it over again. Was that what this was supposed to do? Read this tome and understand the void, thanks to what it said? He snorted, putting it back away. It felt like the tome had actively made his understanding worse, since he was struggling to figure out how it fit into what he understood the void to be, except that the void made so much more sense when he thought about the tome at the same time, so he couldn’t abandon it. He sighed aloud. Probably the fact that the tome did an absolute trash job at explaining the void only made it better for him, not worse, but it didn’t help him emotionally. It was still frustrating as hell.
“Rhys? Are you—oh, I’m so sorry.”
Rhys glanced over his shoulder. Korii stood there, looking aghast to have interrupted him in the middle of comprehending a topic. It was a rude thing to do, generally, but Rhys didn’t care much about politeness among mages, and it wasn’t like he’d announced he was going to wander off to study the void, so she wasn’t in the wrong at all. Plus, if she’d come here looking for him, it was probably important. In fact, it was probably about the whole reason he was out here, focusing on the void rather than cooking: because he’d needed a distraction from worrying about Mouse and Lira’s quest. It was probably fine. There was no reason to be worried. Mouse was the stealthiest mage he’d ever met. But he knew nothing about their enemy’s strength at their hideout, and he felt guilty for not going himself, so he couldn’t help but worry. He knew his decision made sense. Someone had to protect their home base, so the Water Syndicate couldn’t take it down while he was out scouting the Water Syndicate, and between scouting and protecting the home base, protecting the home base was far more important. What he worried about, was that the Water Syndicate had the same priorities, and their base was consequently full of Tier 3 mages while the weak Tier 2s got sent out to attack him.